Ask RiotACT

Ask RiotACT: recommendation on home wifi setup?

I have recently moved into a double story house in Lyons. I have my wireless router / internet connection in a spare bedroom upstairs. I have a home office downstairs. I have been having a lot of performance related issues with my internet. It consistently drops out, and I find speeds are all over the shop. To their credit, Telstra, my isp, have had people over checking the nodes etc (ADSL2). I now have a lot of devices (12) connected to my router (which is a netgear 6300 that I purchased about 8 months ago). These devices range from iphones, ipads, macbooks, tvs, bose speakers and foxtel.

I’d like to get someone to come over and review my setup to make sure it is all ok and I haven’t done anything incorrect. I also want to make sure I have the correct hardware.

Or if you pick me up& drop me back and make me coffee while im there, I can give you a free 10-15min consult from my own experience & knowledge. Or cover my petrol cost and i’ll come to you + coffee while im there. Email me editor@mordd-indymedia.com if that interests you. I’m just a helpful person and like making new friends. Give free tech support to people all the time. 🙂

Double story houses are always a bit of a pain, because most routers the signal propagates parallel to the ground, not so much up or down, especially down. And the router you have doesn’t appear to have overly sensitive antenna.

First and cheapest step is to get a WiFi extender and put downstairs. Though do note if you use an extender and have the same SSID as the main router, devices won’t switch to the extender until they have fully lost comms with the main router. So at times you may need to turn more mobile devices to flight mode/off and back on for them to sync to the closer device.

The other option is a myriad of mesh style access points that are coming out these days like this:

The issue is most likely caused by the placement of the router and its internal antennas. These aren’t usually set up to reliably capture or transmit signals to and from far below the device itself.
Try positioning the device on its back, or see if you can hack it to allow external antenna use that you can position to your liking. There are plenty of router external antenna hack YouTube videos you can try out.

One way to fix this would be to set your router to Bridge Mode then buy a small WiFi extender (something like an Apple Airport Express or similar) and install it in your office.
This new extender connects via bridging to our WiFi network main router and extends your network.

Hi Steve. If you find someone it would be great if you could share their name. I approached a couple of companies mid last year. It seemed my wifi setup job was too small for them to show any interest.